Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.

The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.

Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.

The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”

Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400

Francis Hunger – Setun, An inquiry into the Soviet Ternary Computer

book – Institut Für Buchkunst Leipzig – ISBN 3932865480
Looking back at the mysterious early computer research from beyond the Iron Curtain (and its “aura”), with special focus on the Soviet Union, this in-depth investigation unveils the unique Setun project – the first computer to make use of ternary logic (-1, 0, 1). A dead-end innovation, with a life-span of just twelve years, the Setun evolved out of ground-breaking work in the field of Multiple Valued Logic, a logic that proceeds with more than the two values employed in binary systems. The ternary approach was thought to have the potential to go well beyond the binary schemes that the global IT industry and infrastructure still use today. Extensively quoting original materials, the author presents a detailed discussion of Setun’s internal mechanisms, that after almost sixty years sounds incredibly “geeky”, but is nevertheless fascinating. The author grew up in the ex-East German state, and, as such, is able to give an interesting perspective on the former relationship between the two superpowers. We are told about the competitive environment that existed and how this was tempered with academic cooperation and a shared belief in the ethereal, fascinating notion of “progress”. This research has been embodied by Hunger in the form of an art project, a propagation of the painstaking research effort. Its aesthetic reflects some of the communist bureaucracy cliché: in a cardboard wooden office, Hunger sits with the paper archive of Setun’s information giving answers only to people that follow specific rules (affixed at the entrance) and who queue politely in stanchions. The access to knowledge “configuration” here is a complex metaphor describing Setun’s time and reflecting on how we are used to completely different rules nowadays, using a milestone in computer archaeology as the symbolic content.